It’s the height of the Hong Kong film industry and screenwriter Wong Kar-wai has been given his first chance at directing a feature. Thanks to John Woo, gangster movies are all the rage and Wong has an idea that will make his picture unique: he’ll focus on young, unaccomplished gangsters instead of grizzled badasses. A story about a young man who’s caught between a blossoming romance and his hotheaded partner. Basically he’s remaking Mean Streets but that’s not important right now. What you need to know is that, for a while, As Tears Go By doesn’t feel particularly remarkable. And then, at about the halfway point, this happens:
A lengthy montage of moody locales and hot people, set to a Cantonese cover of a song that’s famously from another movie? Holy shit, now that’s Wong Kar-wai! Yeah, it’s odd that Wong started as a writer given that so much of what makes his movies work is his impressionistic approach to storytelling. You’re really not going to be surprised by the way Wong’s stories go, but the vibes are immaculate. Year after year, I watch his movies and wish I could travel back in time to pre-handover Hong Kong.
It also helps that the hot people are this good. Andy Lau stars as Wah, a mob enforcer who is awoken one morning by a call from his aunt that a distant cousin is coming to stay with him. She is Ngor (Maggie Cheung), a young waitress who lives on nearby Lantau Island and needs to stay in the city for a medical procedure. Before Wah and Ngor can even get to know each other, Wah has to head out and help his “little brother” Fly (Jacky Cheung) collect a debt. Wah beats the shit out of the guy and they call it a good day’s work. Wah goes and finds his girlfriend, Mabel, who tells him she had an abortion and dumps him. Fly manages to have an even worse night, going to try to hustle fellow gangster Tony (Alex Man) at snooker which backfires and ends with Fly being severely beaten.
The next day, Ngor goes to the doctor and finds out she’s going to be fine. To celebrate, Wah offers to take her out on the town that night. As they are about to leave, the bruised and bloodied Fly arrives and collapses in Wah’s doorway. They treat him and then Wah goes out to get revenge. He doesn’t handle it well, to say the least. Ultimately the boss has to step in and tell everyone to cool down and gets Wah and Fly on a payment plan. Wah tries to take Fly out of the game and get him a regular job selling fish balls from a food cart. But you just know Fly’s too much of a fuck-up to keep out of trouble. In the meantime, Ngor decides to go back to Lantau Island and even starts dating her doctor.
That kind of sets the tone for the rest of As Tears Go By. Wah and Ngor have a connection but never really get a chance to explore it. Fly keeps getting into worse and worse trouble because he’s such a wild card loose cannon kind of guy. And I’m sitting here left to wonder, hey Wah, my dude, why do you feel so loyal to this guy who has a certain death wish?
But we’ll always have that “Take My Breath Away” sequence. As Tears Go By did well with local audiences but as far as I can tell went under the radar with Western critics at the time. That spark of brilliance from Wong Kar-wai doesn’t seem as bright when you don’t know to look for it, I guess, and all they saw was another Hong Kong crime movie. It doesn’t even sound like As Tears Go By was that easy to find in the west until Criterion’s World of Wong Kar Wai box set came out in 2021. But the important thing is, Wong believed in himself. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia:
I could have continued making films like As Tears Go By for the rest of eternity but I wanted to do something more personal after that. I wanted to break the structure of the average Hong Kong film.
That led to Days of Being Wild, a movie that has a reputation for having basically no plot at all and set the tone for the rest of Wong’s Hong Kong era. It’s funny to think that if he was American and making making movies now, instead his follow-up would probably be a super hero movie or some franchise legacy sequel. It makes you wonder, what other auteurs have we missed out on because of modern studio economics?